Saturday, October 3, 2009

A Country Field

An old wagon in a field of yellow bitter weeds between the Hopewell and Greenwood communities west of the Tombigbee River is seen on an early Autumn day. In the olden days folks tried to keep their cows from eating bitter weed as it would make the milk bitter.

5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Wow!, that's some kind of bitter weed patch!, and you surely couldn't drink the milk when the cow ate that flowery weed. I remember a plant "here and there" in my grandparents "cow pasture" - don't ask, I just never saw horses in there and granddaddy always referred to the fenced area as the "cow pasture" and we didn't question granddaddy Morman Stone. Somehow, it seems that it would have been simple enough to pull that particular weed up after a rain so that the milk wouldn't taste bitter. Farmers weeded the garden, cotton and corn patches, but not the pasture! bettye

Bettye, that bitterweed is potent stuff. I remember pulling up the weed when I was a kid playing out by the barn. Another smelly weed is the Joe Pye weed. Some folks call it Queen of the Meadow I believe. That stuff is worse than bitter weed to me.

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